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SAN ROCCO • 66 Stan Allen on Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 * Florencia Andreola and Riccardo Villa on the XIII Triennale * Ido Avissar on the Fifth Dimension, Tokyo-Jin, Femmes Algériennes, and Au hasard Balthazar * Nuno Brandao Costa on social housing by the Great Portuguese Master(s) * Adria Carbonell and Roi Salgueiro Barrio on Vittorio Gregotti * Jasper Cepl, Sam Jacoby, and Valerio Massaro on Grünzug Süd * Michael Cohen and Violette de la Selle on 65 * Lorenzo De Chiffre and Benni Eder on post-war Vienna * Victoria Easton on a candle shop * Laura Evans goes to Cuba * Giancarlo Floridi and Angelo Lunati on the flower kiosk * Fabrizio Gallanti reads Architecture Formes Fonctions * Christophe Van Gerrewey on Sontag’s Against Interpretation * Alberto Geuna, Giulia Ladelfa, and Niccolo Suraci on OMU’s holidays trips * Stylianos Giamarelos on a failed experiment * Christian Gilot on a water history * Wonne Ickx on the McMath–Pierce Solar Telescope * Natalie Koerner on clouds * Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabahn on Venturi’s Lieb house * Nikos Magouliotis on Dimitris Philippides and Greek anonymous architecture * Daniele Pisani on lies and MASP * Nicolò Ornaghi and Guido Tesio in conversation with Paolo Portoghesi * Philippe Rahm tells us once again that ceci killed cela * Damaso Randulfe on a tomb for two * Christian Norton Riley at the Gates of Dawn * Susanne Schindler on American cities * Vivian Telgarsky and William Watson on a hole wrapped in wire * Kersten Geers on Banham, Hockney, and the desert * Roi Salgueiro Barrio on Graham’s Homes for America * Kate Yeh Chiu on the Sea Ranch by Halprin * Ludovico Centis on Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli * David Himelman on a library by Stanley Tigerman * with a set of pictures by Bas Princen on Breuer, Stirling, and Price.

SPONSORDipartimentoArchitetturaeDesign,ScuolaPolitecnica,UniversitàdegliStudidiGenova

FRIENDSAnthonyAmesCorradoBeldìBunkerhotel+CityförsterRotterdamconrad-bercahIvoCovicETHArchitectureofTerritoryFrancescoGarofaloKulttuurisaunaMassachusettsInstituteofTechnologyMaxwanArchitects+UrbanistsMoMALucaMontuoriFrancisNeedhamOBRsrlPavillondel’ArsenalMoisesPuenteAndreaRaičevičNilsRostekItaloRotaKimRothuysNicolaSimonGuidoTesioTheFleetLibraryatRhodeIslandSchoolofDesignMaxTurnheimAnastasiaVaynbergUGENT-VakgroepArchitectuurBibliotheekclemenszirkelbach

CONTENTS

3 Editorial

5 65 Michael Cohen and Violette de la Selle

11 The Facts Have the Floor: Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag Christophe Van Gerrewey

15 Pynchon’s Oblique Aerial Stan Allen

18 A Special Year Like Any Other Architecture Formes Fonctions Fabrizio Gallanti

26 Histoires d’eau Christian Gilot

31 Free(D) Time: the Spatialisation of Leisure from the Xiii Triennale Until Today Florencia Andreola, Riccardo M. Villa

40 Fifth Dimension, Tokyo-Jin, Femmes Algériennes, Au Hasard Balthazar Ido Avissar

44 Dreamclouds Natalie Koerner

52 To Coincide and Disappear Kersten Geers

58 Cuba, 1966 Laura Evans

62 Go West, Omu Alberto Geuna, Niccolò Suraci, Giulia La Delfa

69 Complexity and Complication Positions of the Object in Il Territorio Dell’architettura

Roi Salgueiro Barrio and Adrià Carbonell Rabassa

76 Architecture and Revolution Paolo Portoghesi in Conversation with Nicolò Ornaghi and Guido Tesio

84 “What We Hold as Ugly and Infuriating Today Will Be ‘Established’ in a Decade” Dimitris Philippides and the Historiography of Anonymous Architecture in Greece Nikos Magouliotis

93 How Printing Silenced Architecture Philippe Rahm

100 “1966 Can Be the Year of Rebirth for American Cities” Susanne Schindler

110 Photojournalism the Difficult Task of Making Public Work in Good Faith Roi Salgueiro Barrio

120 The Piper at the Gates of Dawn Chris Norton Riley

122 The Anti-Hierarchical Atelier That Could Not Last Stylianos Giamarelos

133 Grünzug Süd: an Urban Design Manifesto Jasper Cepl, Sam Jacoby, Valerio Massaro

144 Site and Speculation Kate Yeh Chiu

153 A Vinnese Concept for an Analogue Postwar Grossstadt Manifesto Lorenzo De Chiffre and Benni Eder

159 Type as a Monument Nuno Brandão Costa

170 Too Beautiful To Be True: Lina Bo Bardi’s Masp, or An “Architectured” Lie Daniele Pisani

180 Tomb for Two Dámaso Randulfe

190 A Hole Wrapped in Wire William Watson and Vivian Telgarsky

199 Breuer Stirling Price Bas Princen

206 A Day at the Beach Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan

210 Ås! Giancarlo Floridi and Angelo Lunati

215 Separated at Birth Ludovico Centis

227 Putting Up A Front David Himelman

234 Es Ist Kein Organisches Material Sichtbar Victoria Easton

241 For All the Wrong Reasons Myron Goldsmith and the Mcmath–Pierce Solar Telescope Wonne Ickx

249 Muerte Call For Papers

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“1966 can be the year of rebirth for American cities.” With this decla-ration of optimism, and overlooking ample evidence to the contrary, President Lyndon B. Johnson opened his special message to Con-gress on 27 January 1966, proposing a new “Demonstration Cities” programme to “set in motion forces of change in great urban areas that will make them the masterpieces of our civilization”. Johnson sketched out an initiative “larger in scope, more comprehensive, more concentrated, than any that has gone before” to tackle the poverty, racial segregation and physical decay of the nation’s cities.1 Part of his vision of the Great Society, the programme was conceived as a five-year experiment to demonstrate alternatives to the human displacement and physical destruction caused by the existing strat-egy of urban renewal, in place since 1949. But it was also a more immediate response to the civil unrest that had taken hold of US cities since 1964. African-Americans, excluded from postwar pros-perity and largely confined to the decaying inner cities, made their plight known through violent protests referred to as either “riots” or “rebellions”, depending on your political standpoint. To target the roots of this inequality, Demonstration Cities was to coordinate all available federal funding for social, economic and physical renewal in close cooperation with residents of selected target areas.

In this article I provide a snapshot of what was considered pos-sible in terms of urban planning in the United States in 1966. I focus on New York City since the programme – renamed Model Cities on its signing into law in November 1966, to avoid the riotous conno-tations of “demonstration” – was paired and enhanced here with a housing initiative focused on small-scale infill and rehabilitation. A

“1966 CAN BE THE YEAR OF REBIRTH FOR AMERICAN CITIES”

Susanne Schindler

1 QuotesarefromthetranscriptofJohnson’sfullspeechasprintedintheNew York Times:“TextofPresident’sSpecialMessagetoCongressonImprovingNation’sCities”,27January1966,20.

look at the five plans produced between late 1966 and early 1967 as part of this effort reveals an acute awareness, among planners and residents, of both the opportunities and the limits of using housing to further the triple goals of better design, more equitable develop-ment and stronger democracy.

In June 1966, under newly elected Mayor John Lindsay, New York City launched the Vest Pocket Housing and Rehabilitation pro-gramme in anticipation of the new federal funding – “vest pocket” referring to new housing built in smaller than full-block sites that were either vacant or underused, “rehabilitation” to the renovation of existing tenements. Unlike the “stereotyped” towers that had been “designed in a vacuum of participation”, the new housing was intended “to fit into” the neighbourhood in “size and charac-ter”. The programme targeted “the city’s worst slums”, proposing to jump-start their “turn around” through the addition of 800 units of public, low-income housing and an equal amount of non-profit, middle-income housing.2 Private investment was then to follow the public sector’s lead.

In November 1966 the city, consciously or not, engaged five strik-ingly different teams of planning consultants to work with the resi-dents of the designated study areas on vest pocket housing plans. The task was clear: the committees were to site the allocated new housing. Four of these study areas were located within the envi-sioned, much larger future Model Cities neighbourhoods: Bedford–Stuyvesant and East New York covered substantial parts of Central Brooklyn; Mott Haven was just a small part of the South Bronx; and Milbank–Frawley a mere corner of Harlem/East Harlem. The fifth study area, Twin Parks, a more affluent neighbourhood in the cen-tral Bronx, was never considered for Model Cities.

The resulting studies were presented in April 1967. In June the city authorities approved the selection of sites and applications for planning grants were submitted to Washington shortly thereafter. In mid-July, just as the nation was gripped by fresh round of civil unrest, the city released People & Plans, a ten-page pamphlet docu-menting the process to date and the ultimate goal of 14,500 new or rehabilitated units of housing.

The five plans provide a rare and remarkably clear view of the moment when planning – by definition a state-enabled endeavour, due to the question of land use and control – was both called into

2 QuotesarefromNYCHousingandDevelopmentAdministration,People and Plans: Vest Pocket Housing, The First Step in New York’s Model Cities Program,July1967,aswellascoverageintheNew York Times.Thiswasasmallnumberofhousingunitscomparedtothesizeoftheareastobestudied;Bedford–StuyvesantinBrooklyn,forinstance,encompassed400,000residentslivingin120,000dwellingunits–equaltotheentirepopulationofmanymid-sizedcitiesatthistime.

Next page: Map locating the four vest pocket housing study areas, as well as the Twin Parks, designated as “Rehabilitation Areas” and by slightly different names. Source: NYC Department of City Planning, Newsletter, August–September 1966

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question as anti-social and considered essential to creating a more equitable society. As a programme, vest pocket housing is a little-known colleague of better-known efforts across the Atlantic, includ-ing those undertaken simultaneously in Bologna by the communist-led municipal council, or those initiated over a decade later with West Berlin’s IBA 84/87. Fifty years on, confronted with frightening-ly similar conditions of inequality, the five plans make us question our own ability to engage in “demonstrations”, or experiments with open outcomes, as opposed to following “models”, or normative, ideologically foreclosed solutions.

Inspired by the many existing owner-occupied brownstones in the Bedford–Stuyvesant area, what Raymond & May are suggesting in this rendering is that “community” does not necessarily mean “communal”, and that the aspirational, status-enforcing role of housing should not be disregarded, especially in low-income neigh-bourhoods. The rendering co-opts the representational techniques generally reserved for the marketing of new residential development in the suburbs: the aerial view in saturated colours and strong shad-ows provides maximum insight into the amenities on offer, includ-ing private patios, lush vegetation and car parking. That this style was employed to promote, not new towns, but low-rise street-edge buildings in “the nation’s largest ghetto”, discussed in a vocabulary of “fabric”, “scale” and “frontage”, is reflective of Raymond & May’s broader philosophy.3 The planning firm believed in holding on to

3 GeorgeRaymondwasbornin1909inOdessa,grewupinNewYork,andgraduatedwithanundergraduatedegreefromColumbiain1946.Hegainedexperiencebothasanurbanrenewalconsultantandasanoutspokencriticoftheprogramme.In1963hefoundedthecountry’sfirstuniversity-basedcommunitydesigncentre,thePrattCenterforCommunityImprovement,atPrattInstituteinBrooklyn,wherehewasdirectorofplanning.Heremainedactiveasacommentatoronhousingissuesuntilhisdeathin2005.Formoreonthe50-yearhistoryofthe(renamed)PrattCenterforCommunityDevelopment,seehttp://www.prattcenter.net/50-years/50-things.

Raymond & May’s rendering of Bedford-Stuyvesant shows the hoped-for “dramatic overall effect” of the vest pocket programme in Bedford-Stuyvesant: “New housing blends with existing and rehabilitated structures … The overall neighbourhood density remains low and livable.” Source: Raymond & May Associates, Vest-Pocket Housing in Bedford-Stuyvesant. A Summary Report to the Community and City on Some of the First Steps in New York’s Model Cities Program, June 1968

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planning expertise while responding to the desires of the commu-nity it was working with. Here, this meant a separation of different income groups. An earlier rendering, published in 1967 in People & Plans, had shown that low-income housing was to be built as large apartment blocks, while middle-income households were to have access to individual houses to be configured with one or two rental units below, and a larger unit for the owners above. By 1968, as this image shows, this idea had been adjusted: the rental apartments were less different and mixed in among the individual homes.4

Black lines indicate a street front and sidewalks. Mounted into these outlines is a photograph of a single four-storey house. This vacant, haunted, Superstudio-like image encapsulates Walter Thabit’s main message for East New York: a cautioning as to the futility of trying to save a deeply troubled neighbourhood through a smattering of new housing. But while Thabit resorts to visual communication on the report’s cover, architectural design or images were not what the trained planner was interested in.5 Rather, his 122-page report is made up exclusively of maps surveying socio-economic conditions, spreadsheets of development costs, and densely typed text report-ing on what residents want and need – not the new housing pro-posed by the city, but jobs, education and health services. Accord-ingly, Thabit’s proposition is not a physical plan but a “development framework”. Of the seven steps, only the first is about the siting of new housing. All others focus on job training, job creation and the operation of housing as a cooperative, non-profit endeavour. “Poorly operated properties are to be made liveable through group manage-ment”, Thabit writes. “These [locally established] companies should be organized to train and use local labour.”6

Architect Barry Jackson’s proposition for Harlem was to harness the power of computation to empower the community in order to ad-dress the ever-changing conditions of development.7 While Jackson delivered to the city the required map of development sites (largely selected on the basis of vacant land) and a rendering of what the architecture might look like (a highly detailed and volumetrically articulated building of concrete and brick), Jackson’s larger aim was to develop a computer program to analyse all data affecting housing development and management, from real-estate values to zoning laws, from construction costs to maintenance needs. In a 1967 arti-

4 Raymond&May,Vest Pocket Housing in Bedford Stuyvesant. A Summary Report to the Community and the City on Some of the First Steps in the New York Model Cities Program,June1968.QuotefromIntroduction,9.5 Thabitwasbornin1921toChristian-SyrianparentsinBrooklyn,wherehegrewup.AfterdeploymenttoEuropeinWorldWarII,hestudieddesignatBrooklynCollege,sociologyattheNewSchool,andobtainedagraduatedegreeinurbanplanningatMITin1953.HeworkedforfouryearsinBaltimore’splanningdepartment,thenestablishedhisownplanningofficeinNewYorkin1958.In1964hecofoundedPlannersforEqualOpportunity,abreakawaygroupofthenation’slargestprofessionalorganizationofplanners,totakeaclearstandonissuesofsocialequity.Thismovementbecameknownas“advocacyplanning”.Thabitdiedin2005.ForanaccountofThabit’simpactonNewYorkCityplanningcultureseeMarciReaven,Citizen Participation in City Planning: New York City, 1945–1975,PhDDissertation,NYU,2009.6 WalterThabit,Planning for the East New York Target Area,October1967,97.7 Jacksonwasbornin1932inHarlem,studiedarchitectureatRensselaerandBerkeley,andfoundedthefirmFisher/Jacksonin1964.UponreturningtoNewYorkin1965,hetaught

Walter Thabit’s cover image conveys his fundamental message: it is futile to solve East New York’s problems with a mere smattering of new housing. Source: Walter Thabit, Planning for A Target Area in East New York, October 1967

aseminaronmathematics,computationanddesignatColumbia’sSchoolofArchitecture.JacksonwastheonlyAfrican-Americantoberetainedasaplanningconsultantinthesestudies.ThebeliefthatcomputationalsystemsdevelopedinthedefenceandaerospaceindustriescouldbeadaptedtoaddressurbanproblemswasbeingactivelypursuedatBerkeleyandMITatthistime.SeeFelicityD.Scott,Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency,(Cambridge,MA:MITPress,2016);andJenniferSLight,From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America(Baltimore/London:JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress,2003).

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cle for the Italian design journal Zodiac, Jackson points to the “fail-ure of the designer” who, faced with “the complex array of forces which have impinged upon our environment”, still “fear(s) turning to new tools when the opportunity arises”. Rather, he explains, “The key to any design process is feedback, which may be defined as the continually operating modification of the input of a design system by its output.” An accompanying diagram consists of circles, con-nected by lines, each identifying a different step in the “procedure network”, which he credits to Christopher Alexander.8

Jonas Vizbaras’ Mott Haven Plan advances the idea that designing human community was possible not only in the new town, but in the ghetto.9 The eye-level drawing of a block interior summarizes the approach for Mott Haven, the smallest and physically most clearly defined of the five study areas. The drawing imagines a landscaped area at the interior of a block which would bring together the diverse residents of the surrounding buildings, including households of low and moderate incomes, living in both old or new rental housing, or even new “garden-style walk-up” and “two-family row houses”, to “provide a variety of housing types and … offer a wider range of choices.”10 These “renewed blocks”, a version of reform-era urban courtyard housing, would then be connected to other such blocks through landscaped, pedestrian-only paths. Accordingly, site selec-

tion was concentrated on five adjacent blocks (rather than being scattered widely). Vizbaras’s approach was clearly influenced by his earlier experience in the office of Whittlesey & Conklin, working on the country’s first new town, Reston, Virginia, where “villages” were similarly linked.

The main evidence for the Twin Parks study, produced by architects Jonathan Barnett, Giovanni Pasanella, Jaquelin Robertson, Richard Weinstein and Myles Weintraub, is a small eight-page pamphlet that unapologetically sets out the case for better architectural design: “Vest pocket houses are attractive structures which are designed to fit into the neighbourhood while making more efficient use of land, and to promote a sense of dignity and freedom through mod-ern and imaginative designs … Obviously, stock plans pulled from an architect’s dusty file are out of the question for Twin Parks.”11 And yet the pamphlet contains only two images. The first is a pho-tograph of a cardboard model showing the insertion of two large, parallel slabs among smaller houses. The second is an axonometric line drawing of the two sites of intervention. The old and the new are barely distinguishable in the slight differentiation of line weight and shadows; and the sites were clearly selected to create a legible, urban whole along two major thoroughfares. The Twin Parks study thus advances an understanding of urban design based on a volu-

8 Thearticle,titled“TheRelationshipsBetweenNeedsaretheElementsofForm”,waspublishedinanissuededicatedto“ArchitectureUSA”withaspecialsectionon“ProblemsofRenewalPlanningandDesign”,Zodiac,no.17(1967),210–12.9 Vizbaraswasbornin1921inLithuania,leftthecountryattheoutsetoftheWorldWarII,earnedadegreeinarchitectureatKarlsruheUniversityin1947,andemigratedtotheUnitedStatesasadisplacedperson.Hediedofcancerin1977.10 JonasVizbaras,MottHavenPlan/67,1967.

11 NYCHousingandDevelopmentAdministration,Twin Parks Vest Pocket Housing,December1967,3–4.

The future Urban Design Group’s model photograph of twin slabs inserted between existing low- and midrise buildings at Twin Parks West reveals that legibility of urban form is the ultimate goal. Source: NYC Housing and Development Administration, Twin Parks Vest Pocket Housing, December 1967

Jonas Vizbaras’ drawing for Mott Haven demonstrates the widely held belief that landscape can drive the renewal of a community: “New buildings and rehabilitated tenements enclose open space in the interior of a renewed block.” Source: NYC Housing and Development Administration, People & Plans, July 1967

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metric view of the city as a whole, grounded in site-specific, atypical interventions and not afraid – despite all talk of small scale – of size.

What became of the five vest pocket housing plans? The sites des-ignated by the residents for development or rehabilitation were ac-quired by the city starting in 1967 – a demonstration of the unusual agency given to the resident committees. As to the planning con-sultants: once Model Cities implementation grants were approved in 1968, most were retained to take on the physical planning of the larger areas. The members of the Twin Parks study team had be-come the core of the newly formed Urban Design Group in the De-partment of City Planning in April 1967.12 The site acquisition and continuity in terms of personnel are significant achievements of the early vest pocket planning. Unfortunately, the subsequent difficul-ties of the Model Cities programme have led vest pocket housing to be framed largely in terms of failure. Once the need to set up lo-cal resident committees took hold and the federal money rolled in, so did the logistical and political complications, and the ability to experiment was largely foreclosed. In some cases, infighting within the much-invoked “community” over the relatively large sums of al-located federal money resulted in the complete freezing of approved programmes. After his re-election in late 1969, Mayor Lindsay cen-tralized control over Model Cities and directed his deputies to focus on producing tangible deliverables. In practice this meant that rec-reational, health or job training programmes were often sacrificed to build housing.

Model Cities never really had a chance to prove itself. President Richard Nixon, elected in late 1968, had initially supported the programme; in late 1974, however, he terminated it, together with urban renewal. Vest pocket housing died more quietly, mainly as a consequence of New York City’s declining fiscal options which culminated in near-bankruptcy in 1975. The relative inefficiency of building on small and scattered sites as compared to larger, con-tiguous developments had always been an issue, and despite the best of intentions the programme had not produced enough hous-ing to stem the tide of abandonment in these neighbourhoods.13 As a consequence, the story of Model Cities and vest pocket housing is little known or studied. With the exception of the housing built in the Twin Parks areas, much published at the time, in part due to the involvement of architects including Richard Meier, scant attention

has been paid to the buildings that resulted from the 1966 planning efforts: if published at all, they are never discussed in relation to their origins.

In their extraordinary diversity in terms of analysis, representa-tion and process, the five vest pocket housing plans offer an antidote to this historical disconnect. They show that, when given the opportu-nity, architects and planners can work in conjunction with residents to generate a range of possibilities for employing housing as a tool – but just one of many tools – for addressing urban inequality. The five plans complicate a dominant narrative that still largely shapes urban and architectural discourse in the United States today – one framed by a “bad before”, leading up to c.1960 (and identified with Robert Moses, top-down planning, modernism), and a “good after” (Jane Jacobs, bottom-up initiative, contextual design), which is thought to have taken hold sometime around the mid-1970s and to still endure to the present day. It is an assumption of “goodness” that is being fundamentally challenged in our times by the dominance of private development over democratic participation or design exploration.

12 ThiswasslightlyinadvanceofthefoundingofPeterEisenman’sbetter-knownInstituteofArchitectureandUrbanStudies(IAUS)inOctober1967.EisenmanandmembersoftheTwinParksstudygrouphadbeenpartofthegroupConferencefortheStudyoftheEnvironment(CASE)since1964,whichledtotheirparticipationasteamsrepresentingPrincetonandColumbiaintheJanuary1967MoMAexhibition,The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal. Foradetailedstoryofthemembers,goalsanddebateswithinCASE,aswellasitsendingandmergingintotheIAUS(butnottheUDG),seeStanfordO.Anderson,“CASEandMIT:Engagement”,inA Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture and the “Techno-Social” Moment, a book celebrating the School of Architecture at 150 years,ArindamDutta,ed. (Cambridge,MA:MITPress,2013),578–651.13 AnaccountingofhowmuchhousingwasbuiltunderModelCitieshasnotbeendone.TheendeavourispartiallycomplicatedbythefactthatModelCitiesprovidedonlygapfundingintherangeof10percentofdevelopmentcosts,butprojectsweregenerallyaccountedforaccordingtothemainfundingstream.Inaddition,somesitesacquiredbythecityunderModelCitiesinthelate1960swerenotdevelopeduntilthe1980sorlater,andarethusevenmoredifficulttolinktotheoriginalplanning.

Thelonger-termeffectsofthesocialandeconomicpartsofModelCities–includinghealthcare,childcare,professionaleducationandmanyotherprogrammes–isevenhardertoevaluate.ForacloserdiscussionofthelegacyofModelCitiesandvestpockethousinginthecaseofMottHaven,seeSusanneSchindler,“ModelCitiesRedux”,Urban Omnibus,October2016,http://urbanomnibus.net/2016/10/model-cities-redux/